This study contributes to our understanding of sociocultural variation
in
children's early storytelling by comparing co-narrations produced
by
children and their families from two European-American communities,
one working-class and one middle-class. Six children from each community
were observed in their homes at 2;6 and 3;0 years of age,
yielding a corpus of nearly 400 naturally-occurring co-narrations of past
experience. Analyses of generic properties, content, and emotion talk
revealed a complex configuration of similarities and differences. Working-class
and middle-class families produced co-narrations that were
similar in referential/evaluative functions and temporal structure,
with
a preponderance of positive content. Working-class families produced
twice as many co-narrations as their middle-class counterparts, produced
more negative emotion talk, and used more dramatic language for
conveying negative emotional experience. These findings suggest that
(1) differentiation between working-class and middle-class communities
in the content of early narratives may occur primarily with respect to
negative experience and (2) researchers need to go beyond emotion state
terms in order to accurately represent sociocultural variation in personal
storytelling.